Stroke is a leading cause of permanent disability in adults, with clinical symptoms such as, weakness, spasticity, contracture, loss of dexterity, and pain at the paretic side. Approximately 70% to 80% of people who sustain a stroke have upper-extremity impairment and require continuous long-term medical care to reduce their physical impairment. The traditional view on poststroke rehabilitation is that significant improvements in motor recovery only occur within the first year after stroke, associated greatly with the spontaneous recovery of the injured brain. However, recent studies suggest that intensive therapeutic interventions, such as constraint-induced movement therapy and task-relevant repetitive practice of the affected limb, can also contribute to significantly reduced motor impairment and improved functional use of the affected arm in persons with chronic stroke.
In the absence of direct repair on the damaged brain tissues after stroke, neuro-rehabilitation is an arduous process, because poststroke rehabilitation programs are usually time-consuming and labor-intensive for both the therapist and the patient in one-to-one manual interaction. Recent technologies have made it possible to use robotic devices as assistance by the therapist, providing safe and intensive rehabilitation with repeated motions to persons after stroke. Commonly reported motion types provided by developed rehabilitation robots are: (1) continuous passive motion, (2) active-assisted movement, and (3) active-resisted movement. During treatment with continuous passive motion, the movements of the patient's limb(s) on the paretic side are guided by the robot system as the patient stays in a relaxed condition. This type of intervention was found to be effective in temporarily reducing hypertonia in chronic stroke, and in maintaining joint flexibility and stability for persons after stroke in the early stage. In active-assisted robotic treatment (or interactive robotic treatment), the rehabilitation robot would provide external assisting forces when the patient could not complete a desired movement independently. Robotic treatment with active-resisted motion involved voluntarily completing movements against programmed resistance.
Despite positive documentation of overall clinical outcomes following robot-assisted rehabilitation of chronic stroke, and easily modifiable system capable of training multiple bodily limbs in multiple planes have not been developed. The majority systems require multiple modules that must be switched out to accommodate different modes of training.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a robotic training system and modules for multiple limb training and overcome the disadvantages and problems in the prior art.